Klaviyo is moving deeper into AI-powered customer engagement by agreeing to acquire Agency, a three-year-old startup built around AI customer success. The deal also reunites Klaviyo co-founder and CEO Andrew Bialecki with Elias Torres, the serial entrepreneur who once hired and mentored him early in his startup career.
What Klaviyo Is Buying
Klaviyo is a publicly traded e-commerce marketing automation platform. Agency, founded in 2023, focuses on AI-powered customer success. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Before the acquisition, Agency had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures, and Felicis. The company is bringing a 25-person team into Klaviyo as part of the transaction.
The strategic fit is straightforward: Klaviyo already has AI agent products, and Agency is expected to accelerate their development and expansion. Klaviyo’s current agent lineup includes Composer, which builds marketing campaigns, and Customer Agent, which supports post-sale tasks such as returns and order tracking.
Andrew Bialecki told TechCrunch, “Elias and the team built a great product with Agency.” He added, “We’re going to take that and combine it with our agent products and try to bring that to 200,000 businesses—and hopefully to millions more over the next couple of years.”
Why Elias Torres Matters To The Deal
For Klaviyo, this is not only a product acquisition. Torres will join the company as chief product officer, giving him a direct role in shaping how Klaviyo develops AI agents for businesses and their customers.
Torres has a history of building companies that later found major exits. He co-founded Performable, which was acquired by HubSpot in 2011. He later co-founded Drift and served as CTO there for eight years until its $1.2 billion sale to Vista Equity in 2021.
His connection to Bialecki goes back to Performable. In 2010, Torres hired Bialecki, who had graduated from Harvard two years earlier, as one of the startup’s first engineers. Torres also mentored Bialecki on early-stage startup dynamics.
Torres recalled Bialecki’s learning curve from that period by saying, “He soaked it up in a short amount of time.”
A Reunion Years In The Making
Bialecki founded Klaviyo shortly after leaving Performable. The company was initially bootstrapped. When Klaviyo raised its first outside capital in 2015, Bialecki invited Torres to back the seed round as an angel investor.
Klaviyo later completed a high-profile IPO in September 2023 at a $9.2 billion valuation. Since then, its stock has taken a hit alongside other SaaS companies, according to the source article.
The acquisition therefore connects several stages of both founders’ careers: the early Performable years, Torres’ role as an investor in Klaviyo, Klaviyo’s public-company phase, and now a renewed partnership around AI agents.
Bialecki described the reunion in terms of a shared product direction. “Elias and I coalesced on the mission of how we provide agents for businesses that they can give to their customers,” he said. He also said he is excited to work with Torres again as he did at the beginning of the cloud era.
The AI Agent Bet
Klaviyo’s case for the acquisition rests on the belief that AI agents can become a larger part of how businesses handle marketing and customer service. Composer and Customer Agent point to two related but distinct use cases: creating campaigns before a sale and resolving customer needs after a purchase.
Agency’s customer success focus fits into that second area, especially where customers need help with support tasks like returns and order tracking. The source article does not describe a separate roadmap, but it does make clear that Agency’s product and team are intended to strengthen Klaviyo’s agent products.
Bialecki and Torres also believe Klaviyo’s years of customer data give the platform an advantage over competitors like Decagon and Sierra. That matters because AI agents in this context are not presented as standalone tools. They are being positioned as part of a broader platform that already serves businesses.
The company’s stated ambition is large. Bialecki spoke about bringing the combined product work to 200,000 businesses and potentially to millions more over the next couple of years. That target frames the Agency acquisition as a scaling move, not simply a talent deal.
Bialecki summed up the broader thesis this way: “It’s the next big tech revolution: agents. Let's get the band back together, and let's go build.”